Flames turn five businesses into ruins on Van Nuys Boulevard

Thursday was the first morning in Ali Zaghari's memory that he didn't go to work at his men's clothing store on Van Nuys Boulevard.

Instead, Zaghari spent the morning starting across the six-lane street at the row of shops reduced to steel frames and ash by an overnight fire and asking people he'd never met what he's supposed to do now.

"That was my life," he said of the unfortunately named Flame Fashions Inc.

His business was one of five that were wiped out early Thursday by a fire that devastated a strip of mom-and-pop businesses in the 6500 block of Van Nuys Boulevard.

The blaze was reported at 12:30 a.m., and took 106 firefighters more than two hours to extinguish, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott. No injuries were reported.

Officials estimated the fire caused $1.5 million in damage to the one-story, 100-by-150-foot building erected in 1952 less than one-half mile north of the Van Nuys Civic Center.

Investigators were working Thursday to pinpoint the cause.

Owners of the five businesses affected said insurance couldn't cover their total loss.

"It's terrible," said Leonard Levinson, owner of the Pawn Broker, as he stood with his wife, Helen, in a coned-off traffic lane and watched street crews clear charred scraps of his shop from the sidewalk.

"When can we start (rebuilding)? It seems like we lost our business."

Zaghari said he locked up his store at 8 p.m. Wednesday and planned to reopen as usual at 9:30 a.m. Thursday. But sometime in between he was awakened by a phone call from the building's owner.

Similar calls went to the owners of the adjacent pawn shop, as well as a Mexican restaurant, vitamin store and women's clothing store.

Levinson said he arrived in time to see the end of the blaze.

"It was fire all over the place. The whole roof was on fire," said Levinson, a 43-year-old Encino resident.

Levinson, a father of three, said the pawn shop he has owned for three years was not recession-proof but "we were making a living" from it and from a pharmacy he owns in Van Nuys.

In cloudy daylight Thursday, a bulldozer stirred up a smoky stench. One of the palm trees that line the boulevard was singed.

Most of the building's roof was gone, cut out by firefighters to keep the flames from spreading sideways to the attached building to the north - perhaps saving an electronics repair shop, a money-transfer store, a mini-market and a hair salon.

Little remained to tell passersby what kinds of businesses had been destroyed, only signs on a wall of the Mexican restaurant advertising "Breakfast Served All Day" and a lucha libre wrestling show, a green-and-white placard in the pawn shop offering loans, now-naked female mannequins in the women's clothes store, and a rack of men's shirts in Flame Fashions.

Zaghari, standing in front of the tire store across Van Nuys Boulevard from the gutted Flame Fashions, said he's waiting to hear how a fire so large could have started in the middle of the night.

"The only thing I know right now is I'm shocked," he said. "This is very hard."

Life went on all around the five devastated stores on the west side of Van Nuys Boulevard.

Abraham Peraza, a repairman at Five Stars Electronics, marveled that his shop, set off from the destroyed Mexican restaurant by a cement wall, suffered only minor water damage and probably could re-open later Thursday.

He said store owners on Van Nuys Boulevard would have expected a robbery before they'd have expected a fire.

"We're always looking out for each other here," Peraza said. "Van Nuys is a busy street. This is an OK neighborhood, but you get some people who look a little - what's the word? - uncouth."

Violeta Nikolova, who runs the Angel mini-mart, said it was only when she arrived at work Thursday morning that she learned what had happened three doors up the street.

Having seen her market was untouched by the fire, Nikolova said: "Thanks, God."

Zaghazi wasn't that lucky.

He said he opened Flame Fashions in 2004 and had run the business himself "seven days (a week), 365 days."

Zaghazi was asked if he was serious. He worked absolutely every day? He really couldn't remember his last day off?

"No option," he said with a shrug. "I have a wife. I have a child. A man needs to work. A man cannot just stay home."